Manage Your Talent and Develop Leaders by Cultivating Emotional Intelligence and Other Key Success Indicators

Want to retain your company’s top talent, increase morale, productivity and profitability?

Of course. But how?  And just how does emotional intelligence develop leaders and increase profits?

Make sure the leaders and emerging leaders in your company continually cultivate the key dimensions of successful leaders.

Recently, the Group Head of Human Capital at USB AG, John Mahoney-Phillips spoke at a Kenexa leadership seminar on developing talent.

Mahoney-Phillips noted that there are several dimensions that consistently predict successful leadership potential in employees. He further noted that these qualities are universal and demonstrated in leaders across countries and backgrounds as diverse as Ghandi and Churchill.

Among the talents of the most successful leaders is the ability to continuously learn. This is more important than ever, observes Mahoney-Phillips as we now live in a world “where there is a mass of information that is hugely fragmented.”

Skillful leaders must be able to weed through the constant flow of data separating, and implementing the useful from the superfluous, separate emotions from fact, and do this quickly.  Now, more than ever, a hallmark of successful leaders are those on a course of constant intellectual growth.

Not only is intellectual growth essential, but emotional growth as well.

The willingness to place ones self in new situations, where the opportunity for personal and professional growth abounds is also a key component in exemplary leaders. While putting yourself in positions that might be outside your bounds of comfort because they are unknown or uncertain allows you to stretch and learn new skills and approaches to the best way to deliver results in the workplace.

Trying new approaches also requires emotional resilience as you open yourself up to the idea that your old habits will no longer produce the results you’re looking for. Resilience and a measure of humility and curiosity will benefit any current and emergent leader.

As Mahoney-Phillips points out “we don’t yet know what the demands on leadership will be.” Yet, history proves that those who are devoted to life-long learning, emotionally resilient, accountable and emotionally intelligent will be *the* asset that companies the world over will find most valuable.

Until next time,

Crystal Jonas